announced a suspension of the withdrawal. However, in all this
there was a large dose of bluff (Rubin, 1988), for it remained fun-
damentally in the USSR’s interest to extract itself from
Afghanistan, whether Najibullah survived or not. The Soviet Union
met the 15 August deadline for the withdrawal of half its force, and
completed the full withdrawal on time as well.
Cordovez, who remained the Personal Representative of the
Secretary-General, was involved at this time in putting forward a
plan for a cease-fire and the replacement of Najibullah’s regime
with a transitional ‘Council of Notables’ to organise a Loya Jirgah,
something for which he called in Islamabad on 9 July 1988
(Rubin, 1989). Cordovez in his memoir blames the failure of this
approach in part on plotting by aides of the Secretary-General
(Cordovez and Harrison, 1995: 382–3), and it is clear not just from
this but from comments in Pérez de Cuéllar’s own memoirs that
relations between the Secretary-General and his Personal
Representative had become frosty (Pérez de Cuéllar, 1997: 187).
However, the problems with Cordovez’s approach went much
deeper. In principle it had a number of virtues, but in practice the
time was not ripe for it. First, it was naive to believe that the lead-
ers of Afghan political parties who saw themselves as the vanguard
of a decade-long anti-communist struggle would agree to be thrust
aside in favour of ‘notables’ of uncertain provenance. Cordovez
described those supporting his approach as ‘the silent majority who
have not been heard throughout the war’ (Cordovez and Harrison,
1995: 376), but without apparently appreciating that such a claim,
even if it were true, would be offensive to resistance groups cap-
able of thwarting the approach he was promoting, since the impli-
cation was that they were unrepresentative. Second, the prospects
for a cease-fire were negligible, given that Afghanistan was awash
with commanders independent of external control. Third, the term
Loya Jirgah at that particular time was a controversial one
amongst Afghans, with some viewing it as an instrument of
Pushtun domination (Dupree, 1989: 46–7). Fourth, and most fun-
damentally, some (although not all) of the resistance leaders, and
some of their key backers, believed that the battlefield offered a
146 The Afghanistan Wars